Spiritualized: Sweet Heart Sweet Light

Jason Pierce talks about the curious cover of his new album.

Take Cover features interviews with the people behind today's most striking album covers.

The front of Spiritualized's forthcoming seventh album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light, asks its own questions. And, as mastermind Jason Pierce told us in an interview last week, many of the answers involve his battle with a degenerative liver disease that had him going through an arduous, experimental treatment process-- lots of pills and injections-- while mixing the record. "The treatments are worse than having the disease," he says. But the good news is that he's on the mend: "I'm all sorted out-- back on tour and well." Now, about that cover...

Pitchfork: What's the thinking behind this cover?

Jason Pierce: The album was always going to be called Huh?, but I couldn't for the life of me picture people going to buy it with that name. I kept picturing people locked in a Monty Python-like loop of trying to ask for the record with a question: "Have you got the new record, Huh?" "Huh?" It would just be this endless cycle. So I figured the best way to deal with that was to make the artwork like The White Album, where that name would travel and people would end up referring to the album as Huh? because it was all over the artwork.

The other main thought behind it was that everybody has been moaning about the lack of 12" sleeves to put artwork on-- you know, the good old days when people made vinyl records. But I thought I'd make a piece of artwork that would work on a one-inch square. It doesn't matter how small that piece of work gets, it still looks amazing on a tiny little digital image.

Pitchfork: Why were you originally calling it Huh?

JP: Because I didn't really know what I was doing, and I was trying to make a record while under these lousy drugs I had to take everyday, and that's kind of what they did to my brain: Huh? It was like an enforced sobriety: I couldn't drink, couldn't do anything I would normally do. I was popping myself up with these chemicals everyday, so it felt like I wasn't right in my own head while I was making the record. "Huh?" was the best way to put that across; the cover also looks like a medical logo or a chemical symbol.

Pitchfork: What kind of medication were you on?

JP: I put myself down for medical trials because it shortened the treatment time. It was a bit of an unknown, "let's see if this works" kind of thing. I figured that I had thrown enough [drugs] in already, it could only do good. Or some good might come of it, at least.

I don't know what they were developed for originally-- they were just like chemotherapy drugs, and they made me feel like shit. I'd like to be able to say they've got some redeeming qualities, but there aren't really any-- except that I got better! So I gave myself the making of this album to get over it because, once I get on tour, I don't want to be doing stuff like that. And now I've got this record, but it doesn't feel like I made it, in a weird way. Now that I'm talking about it, it feels even odder. It might have worked out different if it hadn't been made under those circumstances.

"I was trying to make a record while under these lousy drugs I had to take everyday, and that's kind of what they did to my brain: Huh?"

Pitchfork: As somebody who's known for making druggy music, was it ironic for you to be forced to make music on drugs with this album?

JP: [laughs] Yeah, there's a whole mountain full of irony there! The difference, of course, is that there's no joy with these drugs, they just completely mess with you. It actually wasn't as bad doing these drugs as it was trying to work out when I was going to do them. Just the sort of head fuck of knowing that I had to make time in my life for this. Nobody has a year in their life when they can just say, "Well, I can just take this time out," you know?

Pitchfork: Did you ever consider just putting this album off until after the treatment was over?

JP: Yeah, nearly every day! But that's what I set myself to do, and I don't like making records in the best of times. And that's why I took eight months to mix, and that's why I made the record at home. I wasn't trying to make any great statement-- I just didn't know if I was going to be well enough to be in studios. I had an engineer but I didn't tell him what was going on. Sometimes he would come around and we'd do nothing, or I would do work for an hour and then say, "That's about it for today." I didn't make a big deal out of it; I didn't think it was important to have somebody ask me how I was everyday. I didn't know the engineer too well, though we became friends while I was making the record. But, during it, he probably thought I was pretty fucked up, or just lazy. [laughs]

Pitchfork: You're talking about the muddled state you were in while making this album, but it actually sounds very crisp and relatively straightforward.

JP: Yeah, people think I made a light-hearted pop record because I was feeling light-hearted. I wanted to make a record that I never made before, and it seemed like the pop part of Spiritualized is the bit I'm most uncomfortable about. With abstract music, the more weird and out-there your music gets, the more it comes with kind of a disclaimer where you can say, "You're not hip to this," or, "You're not ready for this." But, with pop music, everybody understands the medium, so there's nowhere to hide. And I also thought, "It's gotta be easier making a pop record than something that doesn't have those straight-ahead rules." But almost all of the vocals are exposed, the lyrics are exposed. It wasn't easy going.